Trump remembers former ‘Apprentice’ contestant Meat Loaf: ‘Great guy’

Former President Trump is remembering Meat Loaf as a “great guy” after the “Bat Out of Hell” singer died on Thursday.

“Meat Loaf was a great guy — got to know him very well doing ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’ ” Trump said in a Friday statement. “He was smart, talented, open, and warm.”

Meat Loaf, born Marvin Aday, appeared on the NBC competition series hosted by Trump in 2011. 

Trump described the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” actor’s success as “enormous,” saying, “We all loved him.” 

“Meat Loaf will be greatly missed!” Trump said in the statement.

A statement on the rocker’s official Facebook page said that the performer, who was 74, was “surrounded by his wife Deborah, daughters Pearl and Amanda, and close friends.” A cause of death was not given. 

The entertainer said he became “good friends” with Trump, then a New York real estate developer, during the filming of “Celebrity Apprentice,” but the relationship became strained when he was asked by a journalist about whether Trump would make a good commander in chief. 

“And I answered honestly — ‘Well he’s not running for president. But if I was president I would see if I couldn’t get him to join the staff in a finance position and give me advice on finances and the economy as the man is really smart at that,’” Meat Loaf told the United Kingdom’s Daily Express in a 2020 interview. 

His response made Trump “really angry,” according to Meat Loaf, who told the tabloid, “I stood up to him because I’m really not afraid of him and if I was in his Cabinet I really wouldn’t be afraid of him either.” 

Meat Loaf, who performed at a 2012 rally for then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, called his own political views “schizophrenic.”

“I’m neither right nor left, and I’m not sure I’m even in the middle,” he said in a 2012 interview with Esquire. “I have a lot of views to the left, and I have a lot of views to the right, and that really doesn’t put me in the middle. I don’t know what that makes me. It makes me weird. And the album reflects all of that.”